ATLANTA 
Steve Fisher is a genial, reserved, stoic man. He listens carefully to questions, then pauses in thoughtful reflection before answering. His voice rarely changes pitch or is tinged with animosity.

“I’m one of these guys,” he says, “where my glass is always half full.”

There is one exception. When Fisher discusses the events of 15½ years ago before he became San Diego State’s basketball coach, before he led a moribund program to the NCAA Tournament in four straight seasons, he doesn’t talk about leaving Michigan or moving on from Michigan or parting ways with Michigan.

“When I was fired at Michigan,” he says.

Not the softer, less jarring, more ambiguous alternatives. Not, when I was dismissed. Not, when I was let go. Not, when Michigan decided to move in a different direction.

When I was fired. There is an emphasis on the word, fired, with a biting accent on the f.

Michigan is back in the Final Four this weekend for the first time in 20 years, for the first time since Fisher and the Fab Five reached the championship game in consecutive seasons in 1992 and ’93, for the first time since he was — accent on the f — fired by Athletic Director Tom Goss amid a payment-to-players scandal that, an NCAA investigation later found, involved no direct culpability by Fisher.

He is in Atlanta. He’ll be in the Georgia Dome today when the Wolverines play Syracuse for a spot in Monday night’s championship game. He’ll be rooting for the Orange, right?

Yes. Fisher is close friends with Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim.

But he’ll also pull for Michigan. Fisher is good friends with coach John Beilein as well, and Travis Conlan, a point guard on Fisher’s Michigan teams in the mid-90s, is the director of operations.

“It’s called life,” says Fisher, 68. “Sometimes things don’t go the way you think they should … Things happen. But then you do what we did. You make the best of what’s next. The best thing that’s happened to us has been the opportunity out here and this chapter in our lives that could not have been scripted as good as it has turned out for us.

“We’re fortunate to be where we are. That’s what I think about more than anything.”

Read what you will into his words. Either the events of October 1997 have genuinely been soothed by the balm of time, or Fisher resolutely is driving on the high road — practicing what he preaches to his players about not harboring the injustices, real or perceived, of the past.

Is he bitter?

“I think deep down he is,” Bill Frieder says, “simply because he felt he did a great job at Michigan. He thought it was wrong the way they handled the whole thing. I think it still gnaws at him.”

Frieder was Fisher’s predecessor at Michigan, fired on the eve of the 1989 NCAA Tournament when Athletic Director Bo Schembechler learned he had accepted the job at Arizona State for the following season and famously declared, “A Michigan man will coach Michigan.” Fisher, his assistant, took over. Six games later he was NCAA champion.

Fisher would recruit the Fab Five — five freshman starters with black socks, long shorts, brash attitudes — and reach two more Final Fours before booster Ed Martin was implicated in lending four players $616,000 to launder money as part of an illegal gambling operation. Fisher, despite insisting he knew nothing of Martin’s discretions, was fired just days before practice opened in 1997, and records from five seasons were formally “vacated” by the school as part of sweeping self-imposed sanctions.

“When they fired Steve, they set the program back 20 years,” says Frieder, who, like Fisher, lives in Del Mar. “They made some idiotic comments, like: ‘We’re not going to recruit the kind of players that Steve did. We want to recruit the kind of players Duke has.’ They basically handed the state of Michigan over to (Michigan State) Tom Izzo.”

Michigan State has been to six Final Fours since and won a national title in 2000.

He does because he got two degrees at Michigan, then worked there as an assistant coach and for nine seasons as a head coach. Jim Dutcher, a Michigan football player turned basketball coach, helped get him on Johnny Orr’s staff in the 1970s. He reciprocated by hiring Dutcher’s son, Brian, in 1988.

Dutcher would follow Fisher to SDSU in 1999 and remains on his staff. He’s in Atlanta, too, sitting with Conlan’s family at the game today.

“Am I disappointed how they treated Coach? Yeah,” says Dutcher, whose father’s 11-year tenure as Minnesota’s head coach came to a controversial end. “Am I bitter? No … In the end, it’s a business. I know how this business is. I was raised in this business. You get that kind of stay (parts of eight seasons) in our business, that’s a long stay.”

Mark Fisher, an SDSU assistant coach, was a month into his freshman year at Michigan when Goss took over as athletic director and rumors began to swirl about his father’s job security.

He remembers answering the phone at their Ann Arbor home one afternoon, and Goss asking for his father. When he said his father was at the neighbors, Goss left an ominous message: “Tell your dad there’s a press conference tomorrow morning.”

“My heart sank,” Mark says. He opted to stay at Michigan after the family moved west, and he graduated in 2001 with a degree in psychology. He still visits Ann Arbor each summer and considers it “like home.”

A couple of years ago, Beilein heard he was in town and invited him to their offices to talk basketball. He couldn’t — it was his last day there — but he appreciates the gesture: a current Michigan coach reaching out to a past punctuated by asterisks in the media guide.

Asked about the legacy of the Fab Five earlier this week, Beilein said: “I think everybody needs to remember there were great coaches on that team. Those five players were tremendous players, but there were great coaches on that team. That wasn’t just five guys.”

Asked again Friday, Beilein added: “For Steve and his coaching staff to come in that situation and direct a freshman team to the Final Four was terrific. We don’t talk about that enough.”

At the urging of the players, Fisher agreed to attend a single game the season after he was fired. He went with Mark, and that was the last time either has been in Crisler Arena, which removed the NIT championship banner from 1997 along with the Final Four banners from 1992 and 1993 as part of the sanctions.

Will he ever return?

“Well, if we played them, that would be a reason to go back,” Fisher said of Crisler Arena. “But I don’t have any burning desire to see what they’ve done to it. I don’t have any plans to go back.”

Fisher has been on campus once in the past 15 years, for a reception after Schembechler’s funeral in 2006. Last summer he made what amounted to his first public appearance in the state since leaving, a charity golf tournament at the Detroit Golf Club sponsored by Fab Five point guard Jalen Rose.

Fisher said all the right things while riding around in a golf cart. Rose took the opportunity to tell a Detroit newspaper: “I think he got screwed. I don’t think he deserved the way he got ousted.”

“If someone stepped up to the plate and said, ‘Coach, we want to honor you properly,’ that would be a huge first step,” Mark Fisher says. “But I don’t have confidence anyone in the administration is big enough to admit (the school) handled the situation poorly.”

In 2002, Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman ordered the Final Four and NIT banners removed from Crisler Arena’s rafters until at least 2013. But she’s still president and told students in a fireside chat last April: “What happened was not good, and I don’t think they’ll ever go back up. I don’t.”

The 1989 championship banner remains, however. A 20-year reunion for members of that team was held in 2009, but it fell during the basketball season and Fisher, busy at SDSU, didn’t attend. There are tentative plans by some players to organize a 25th reunion next year.